Page 31 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 1 Issue 1 Q4

Bad Medicine and the Body Economic
BY DAVID BUCKHAM
It will more than likely only be in the fullness of time that we will know whether the medicine administered to the broken global nancial system following its 2008 implosion has worked.
At that time, commentators of the calibre of Martin Wolf were asking whether history would look back at that year as an epochal frontier between something once known as capitalism, and something quite dif- ferent. e failure of Lehman Brothers, he postulated, might be the 1989 Berlin Wall moment for capitalism.
To his credit, he did not, even at the height of uncertainty during the crisis, blindly sensationalise the facts. In his column published on the 19th of May 2009, titled ‘ is crisis is a moment, but is it a de ning one?’ he posited that, owing to the “determined” policy response, neither a depression nor the end of capitalism would eventuate. He was right. Neither has occurred. But in the detail his prediction was somewhat o .
e mistake he makes is the mistake we always make, and that is to use the frame of reference we currently inhabit to predict the future. He writes: “Is the current crisis a watershed, with market-led globalisation, nancial capitalism and Western domination on the one side and protectionism, regulation and Asian predominance on the other?”
In his 2009 thinking, Wolf has strongly polarised two geopolitical power centres and then established these centres as being de ned each by two ubiquitous socio-political concepts. On the one hand we have “western domination”, which is driven by, and drives, “ nancial capitalism” and “market-led globalisation”. And on the other hand we have “Asian predominance”, which advocates “protectionism” and “regulation”.
As it turns out, as a function of deep declines in oil and commodities prices, fear of ever more visible jihadist terrorism, a war in Syria, and mass migration into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa, the
“ e mistake he makes is the mistake we always make, and that is to use the frame of reference we currently inhabit to predict the future.”
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